Skip to main content
Drink

Iced Tea

A chilled beverage made from brewed black and green tea, sweetened with sugar, served over cracked ice, optionally with champagne or rum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Black tea and green tea share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Iced Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Brew a mixture of black and green tea.

  2. Pour the tea into bottles and chill them on ice.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, fill goblets with cracked ice.

  2. Pour the chilled tea into the goblets.

  3. Sweeten with sugar to taste.

  4. Add a splash of champagne or rum if desired, but do not add milk.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Black tea + green teatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Green tea + champagnetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Black tea + champagnetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Sugar + champagnetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Green tea + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Black tea
Provides the main tea flavour and tannic bitterness that gives the drink its character.
Green tea
Adds a lighter, grassy note that rounds out the flavour of the black tea.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tea's natural bitterness and astringency.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More iced tea recipes

Russian 8 See all 65 →

You might also like

Champagne PunchChampagne Punch24 recipesGreen TeaGreen Tea8 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipes